Are you facing Window error,  An error occurred while reconnecting Y: to \\user\file ?

This guide is for you.

Window error,  An error occurred while reconnecting happens when someone is trying to access that mapped drive on their computer. This can be due to misconfiguration with drive mapping.

After the Windows 10 build 1709 Fall Creators Update (Enterprise and Education editions), many of our customers using Windows reported that when they tried opening a network shared folder on a nearby computer they got this error.

Mapping a drive refers to that feature of Windows 10 which gives its users a privilege of connecting to disks hosted remotely. 

For those organizations and systems which are connected on a network, this is quite the basic use case. 

Here at Ibmi Media, as part of our Server Management Services, we regularly help our Customers to resolve Windows error as such.

How to fix 'An error occurred while reconnecting' on Windows Server ?

While trying to open a network shared folder on a nearby computer Window 10 build 1709 users often end up with the following error:

Restoring Network Connections An error occurs when you try to open a network folder: An error occurred while reconnecting Y: to \\user\file Microsoft Windows Network: You can't access this shared folder because your organization's security policies block unauthenticated guest access. These policies help protect your PC from unsafe or malicious devices on the network.

Moreover, on other computers with Windows 8.1, Windows 7, or on Windows 10 with a build of up to 1709, the same shared network folders open normally.

Only in the modern versions of Windows 10 (starting from 1709 build), the guest access to the shared folders using the SMBv2 protocol was disabled by default.

When accessing a network folder under a guest account over the SMBv1/v2 protocol, at times makes our session vulnerable to the MiTM (man-in-the-middle) attacks.

In Windows 10 Home and Pro 1709, these changes are not applied and the network access under the guest account works fine.

The best way to fix this issue is to configure access with authentication if only the SMBv2 protocol supported by the device.

How to configure access with authentication if only the SMBv2 protocol ?

Depending on the device on which er store the network folders , we must disable guest access on them:

1. For NAS devices – disable guest access in the settings of NAS device.

2. For Samba server on Linux — if we are sharing network folder using Samba on Linux add the following string to the smb.conf configuration.

Under the section [global]:

map to guest = never

After that we can restrict anonymous access in the section with a description of the shared folder:

guest ok = no

Alternative method- Using the Group Policy Editor (gpedit.msc).

We can change the settings on Windows 10 computers to allow access to shared network folders under the guest account.

This method should be used only as a temporary solution. Since it allows access to folders without authentication significantly reduces the level of security of our computer and data.

With the following steps we can enable access under the guest account from our computer :

1. Firstly, go to the Configuration and take Administrative templates

2. Then take  Network and go to Lanman Workstation.

3. From there find and enable the policy ‘Enable insecure guest logons’.

These policy settings determine whether the SMB client will allow unsafe guest logon to the SMB server.

In Windows 10 Home, which does not have a local GPO editor, we can make changes through the registry editor with the following command:

reg add HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanWorkstation\Parameters /v AllowInsecureGuestAuth /t reg_dword /d 00000001 /f

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